“... who has written the Introduction to a reissued collection, The Springs of Affection) and Joseph Mitchell – as well as Shawn himself. They loved to listen to her because she spoke beautifully and with a lovely accent and in a lovely voice and because she was charming and amusing. But she wasn’t afraid to be caustic or difficult, either. She was aware of ...”

“... decision for apparent bias, but that it was the four judicial conservatives, Roberts, Scalia, Thomas and Alito, who voted to uphold the judgment. They may also now know that, thanks to a subsequent Supreme Court ruling, Massey need no longer channel its subventions through its chairman: it can donate to judicial re-election campaigns corporately and ...”

“... a second brother were dead too.A bright, sensitive teenager, Edwin ‘haunted’ the city’s huge Mitchell Library and ‘a dingy reading-room in the Gorbals, where I pored over all sorts of academic reviews’. He worked first as an office-boy; then, worse, spent much of his twenties in a Clydeside ‘bone factory’ where ‘fresh and decaying ...”

“... still fit enough – or so we were initially told – to govern, and the negligence suffered by Thomas Harvey, a nurse from East London who had worked in the NHS for twenty years, whose family were advised he didn’t need to go to a hospital (they called four times) before he died gasping for air in his bathroom.Oddly, the panic-buying provoked by Covid-19 ...”

“... freight depots, massive grain storage facilities. Night had fallen by the time I reached Mitchell, South Dakota, where a felony drunk-driving court was scheduled to take place at the Public Safety Centre the following morning.The centrality of the car to life in the US isn’t news, but less well-documented is the necessity of driving to the many ...”

“... his. The risible and tragic implications of one-sided boy infatuation were understood long before Thomas Mann.Traces of real affection are discernible in the archives. A Portuguese sacristan sent plaintive love letters to a guitarist, recalling ‘the heart in your loins, when I touched it with my fingers, and instantly it sprang up!’ The letters survive ...”

“... erotic humour … Finally, facetiousness, honest to its own failing.’ She is writing here about Thomas Mann). And she did it when she spoke, shifting pitch and tone and precise degree of suppressed hilarity: ‘You must eat orrrranges,’ when a student went down with a winter sniffle. ‘You must read Marianne Weber, then you will understand the ...”

“... be chaired by Anita Hill (who brought charges of harassment against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas in 1991), is more effective. In the past few months, our understanding of what constitutes sexual harassment has been put under considerable strain. For all the remonstrations of the accused – ‘You’re making a fuss about nothing’; ‘Things were ...”

“... to remember writing some dark allegorical story.Poems?No. I’d written odd poems, very sub-Dylan Thomas. I remember having or buying Thomas’s Collected Poems. I liked the whole idea of him so anything I wrote sort of resembled him, though I pretended it didn’t.Were you working quite hard in the sixth form for your ...”